Google is Updating AOSP Dialer with Floating In-Call Buttons and More

Google has been working on adding some more features to the Google Dialer application but hasn’t yet decided to flip the switch and make the features public just yet. We covered a way to enable the new floating bubble feature in the application late last month but now it looks like more people will have access to this feature if they’re willing to install its open source counterpart. We have found commits that Google is updating the AOSP Dialer application with this specific feature as well as committing to keeping the AOSP Dialer up to date.

This is actually quite interesting because the AOSP dialer (among other AOSP applications and features) has been kept bare for a long time. As Google has put more work into adding features onto the core Android operating system, they have kept a lot of their most interesting features closed source and not accessible for anyone just using a vanilla build of AOSP. Most just prefer to flash a Gapps package on top of their AOSP-based ROMs, but there are many who prefer to go with open source packages and avoid using Google services as much as possible.

This unfortunately has led them to using older and less feature-rich versions of basic applications and services for Android. For example, the AOSP Dialer had previously been sitting at version 10 for quite a while because Google would only update the AOSP Dialer whenever they drop the source code for a major release. However, according to this commit we discovered, the AOSP dialer has been bumped up to version 13 and what’s even better is that Google is moving to a public development model.

That means users of the AOSP dialer won’t have to wait for major new Android version releases to try out new features, and custom ROM developers can incorporate updates to the AOSP dialer much more frequently. As a consequence of this, the AOSP Dialer is receiving those floating in-call buttons that we covered recently.